(This blog post describes an exercise that I often use with my clients. If you’re interested in seeing more accent practice exercises, check out my digital product “How To Practice Accents”here)
Sometimes the hardest thing when attempting a new accent is just starting your sentence. You can’t help but have a nervous feeling that hinders you from speaking in your target accent off the cuff. But no need to worry! There’s a nice little trick to overcome that feeling and that’s to use a catchphrase.
Imagine you’re about to jump into a pool from a diving board. The first time, you’re probably nervous about the jump and walk back and forth on the board a few times considering the best way to muster up the nerves to jump. The second time, you’re perhaps still a bit hesitant but you walk down the diving board and bounce on it a couple times. Remembering that your first jump wasn’t so bad after all, you jump a little more quickly on your second jump. With each jump, you get less nervous until you don’t even remember being nervous in the first place. The diving board is always there to boost your confidence, prepare you for your jump and give you an extra bit of energy before you launch into the water.
You might be just as nervous or uncomfortable trying to speak in your target accent for the first time. Especially early in your accent learning journey. But you can manage your nerves by coming up with an “accent diving board” that boosts your confidence and gets you ready to speak in your target accent. This “accent diving board” should consist of a few words or sentences that you know you can say perfectly in your target accent. We often call this a catchphrase or springboard sentence/words.
Your catchphrase can be a completely random word that you associate with your target accent, or it can be a little phrase that you observed when listening to one of your target accent speakers. It’s great if your catchphrase contains a few of your target accent’s signature sounds but don’t feel like you have to force this. Your catchphrase can change over the years or with each project as well, so just choose one that feels good right now. Once you’ve chosen a catchphrase, say it out loud before and during any practice session and especially anytime you feel like you’re losing the accent. Use your catchphrase in the same way you use the diving board to boost your confidence on your jump into the water. Your catchphrase also prepares your facial muscles and your brain for switching accents.
Go ahead and search for a few words or sentences that you can use as your catchphrase. And then use it the next time you feel hesitant before trying to speak in your target accent, or whenever you feel like you’re losing the accent in the middle of your practice. Here are some of my favorite catchphrases I’ve been using for different accents over the years:
General American:
tomato sauce – Merry Mary’s getting married – Oh my God!
New Zealand:
sweet as – bottle of water – You egg!
Classic RP:
it’s a bit too early in the evening don’t you think – remember to remain composed
Scottish: alright – it’s a girl’s world – that’s what their saying
See how truly random and silly these catchphrases can be – they don’t have to make sense to anybody but YOU 😊
Learning a new accent is hard. Even for those with a natural affinity for picking up new accents, it takes time and a lot of practice. There’s many approaches to learning a new accent and it’s difficult to know where even to begin on your accent learning journey. A great starting point is what we call oral posture, or in other words: how to use your facial muscles for different accents. Understanding this will make any subsequent steps much easier to learn and that’s why it’s the first thing you’ll want to master when learning a new accent.
We don’t often think about our facial muscles – they’re small and we usually speak without being aware of what exactly our mouth is doing. They are muscles just like your bicep or hamstring but you’d never think about including them in your workout at the gym. Yet, you use them every day when speaking and therefore actually work them out more often than many of your other, bigger muscles. This facial muscle workout is tailored specifically to all the sounds particular to your language, your accent, and your idiolect. As a result, you build up strength in certain areas of your face while keeping other muscles more relaxed. This frequent workout results in a very specific setting of your facial muscles, something that is often referred to as oral posture. It’s the perfect base setting for the vowels and consonants YOU use everyday when you speak and it acts like a filter through which your every sound is released into the world. Your personal oral posture allows you to produce YOUR vowels and consonants in a manner unique to your accent, and to do so while being 100% comfortable with it.
Now here’s the thing: a speaker of a different accent is doing an entirely different facial muscle workout every day and as a result, they have a very different oral posture than you! They’re using different muscle movements when they speak and as a result, build strength in different areas of their face. Their “filter” is perfectly tuned to the vowels and consonants THEY use every day. This is why, when you learn a new accent, the first thing you should do is learn a different workout for your facial muscles. Without changing your oral posture, you won’t be able to produce the sounds of a new accent comfortably. For example, if your own oral posture is naturally quite tight with a lot of tension in the jaw and lips, it will be very hard for you to pronounce very open and relaxed sounds that are needed for other accents. You first need to change your oral posture to accommodate for those open and relaxed sounds.
When you use your target accent’s oral posture rather than your own, on the other hand, all the vowels and consonants will already start falling into place and as a result it’ll be so much easier for you to produce these new sounds comfortably. As an actor, it’s especially important to always stay in your target accent’s oral posture when you’re in character as it’ll allow you to quickly jump into your target accent without having to remember how to say every single word.
Find your target accent’s hesitation sound
In order to find out how to change your oral posture, you need to know two things: 1) how you normally use your facial muscles, and 2) how speakers of your target accent use their facial muscles. A good way to find out the oral posture of an accent is the hesitation sound. This is the sound we make involuntarily when we don’t know what we want to say next. It often just slips out without us actively forming a specific sound with our facial muscles and therefore it’s the most relaxed sound yourface can make. In another accent, some muscles might be more tense or more relaxed by default and therefore their most relaxed sound looks and sounds very different from yours. Observing a speaker’s hesitation sound gives you a glimpse at their default muscle settings – which muscles tend to be always tense, which ones are more relaxed and so on. It gives you a snapshot of the “filter” that colours every single one of that speaker’s vowels and consonants.
I want to show you 3 examples of 3 different accents: Standard British English, General American, and Glaswegian.
Watch excerpts of the three videos below and focus only on how the speakers are using their facial muscles. What tendencies can you see? How open or closed is their mouth generally? Or how wide? How often do they round their lips when speaking? How much of their teeth are generally visible? Can you see any tension in their cheeks? See if you can find their hesitation sound to get a good idea of the base setting of their facial muscles.
1) Standard British English – Emma Watson:
2) General American – Amy Adams:
3) Glaswegian – Robert Carlyle
I took screenshots of these three speakers at the moment they were using their hesitation sound. Looking at the three pictures below you can immediately see how different each of their oral posture is:
The hesitation sounds of Standard British English, General American and Glaswegian
Emma Watson generally keeps her mouth fairly open, with a gap between her upper and lower teeth frequently visible. Her oral posture allows her to open her mouth very wide, which is necessary for her vowels in words like BATH or TRAP. In addition to that openness, she also has some tension especially in the lip corners and her cheeks. This makes it look like she always has a teeny smile when speaking.
Emma Watson’s hesitation sound
Amy Adams also keeps her mouth fairly open but opposed to Emma Watson, she doesn’t have much tension in her cheeks or lips. She just allows her jaw to drop loosely and her lips to move to different places flexibly. This makes most American vowels quite relaxed and stretchy, and also gives her the space to comfortably produce her American Rs.
Amy Adams’ hesitation sound
Robert Carlyle, on the other hand, doesn’t allow for much openness in his oral posture. He rarely opens the mouth to reveal his teeth and his oral posture is stretched horizontally, rather than vertically. As a result, you won’t hear him use many open vowels that are commonly used in the other two accents. This tight oral posture has an important effect on many vowels such as in words like GOOSE or MOUTH as well as on Glaswegian R and L sounds.
Robert Carlyle’s hesitation sound
Now, the above three examples show three completely different speakers, with completely different faces, so the oral postures I described above could just be the way they are because of each speaker’s personal facial structure. And to some extent, a person’s individual facial features of course can have an impact on the way they speak. But if you go and find videos of other speakers with similar accents to the three examples discussed here, you will see the same tendencies in how they use their facial muscles, even if their faces look completely different.
We can also observe the impact of oral posture by looking at the same speaker using two different accents. Colin Morgan is a great example of an actor who’s performed using many other accents successfully besides his native Northern Irish one. Compare the excerpt from Channel 4’s “Humans” below, where he’s is using a Standard British English accent, to his interview about “The Fall”, in which he’s speaking with his native accent. Can you see how he’s using his facial muscles in very different ways to achieve the different sounds of these two accents?
Colin Morgan’s base oral posture when speaking with a Standard British English accent (left), and when speaking with his native Northern Irish accent (right).
So there you go, now you know where to start when learning a new accent: Learn how to use your muscles in a different way. Easier said than done, you say? Changing the use of your facial muscles to such an extent is by no means an easy feat. We don’t pay attention to our facial muscles when we speak and we also usually don’t analyse other speakers’ muscle movements when they speak. It takes time and practice to know what fine nuances to look for, let alone to then implement changes to your own way of speaking. This is where working with a dialect coach comes in handy ;). We have years of experience in analysing other people’s speech patterns, know exactly what to look for and can help you get comfortable with new muscle movements. If you’re still unsure about where to start, reach out to me and let’s have a chat!
I recently watched Big Night because I heard it was a cozy little film for food-lovers. Little did I know that I was in for a dialect treat as well! The movie’s protagonists are two Italian immigrants who run a restaurant in 1950’s New Jersey, starring Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub. I had no idea what to expect from this movie, really, so I was extra pleasantly surprised when it wasn’t only a FANTASTIC movie in and of itself, but the dialects in this movie were outstanding too. Often when actors are aiming for Italian accents, many go for the overly stereotyped Mario & Luigi-type (“It’s-a me, Mario”) accents but thankfully, the actors in Big Night didn’t. Instead, Stanley Tucci honoured his Italian heritage and created a film that delivered great, authentic Italian dialects, both in writing and acting.
First, I want to mention one thing done right in Big Night and that I wish was more common in movies and TV shows: The fact that we get to see Primo and Secondo actually speak English AND Italian. Primo and Secondo have been in America for a while by that point and you can see that they got accustomed to speaking English even with each other. Seeing these two immigrants also use their native tongue with each other and other Italian speakers in the movie is an accurate portrayal of bilinguals and adds authenticity and depth to the characters and the story. In many scenes the characters are using both Italian and English in the same conversation. This is called code-switching and an integral part of how bilinguals use language. You can see this type of code-switching in action in the beach scene closer to the end of the film when both Primo and Secondo speak Italian and English with each other, switching seamlessly between the two languages within the same sentence.
Secondly, I’d like to highlight a couple of things that all tie in to one bigger aspect of non-native accents: The fact that non-native English dialects are rarely completely consistent with their features.
The first feature where we can observe that inconsistency in non-native English accents is to do with verb conjugation in English. English has a remarkably simple conjugation system in the present tense. Most verbs are exactly the same for each person, with the exception of the third singular. That means that a verb like “to eat” will be conjugated as “I eat, you eat, we eat, they eat” but “she/he/it eats”. Many other languages have far more complex conjugation systems than that so non-native speakers of English are often relieved to find out that the verb rarely changes in English, and as a result that 3rd singular ‘s’ can easily slip their mind. This is why you can sometimes hear non-native speakers say things like “he eat” instead of “he eats”. I’m sure many English-speaking actors notice this feature about non-native accents and when they then try to imitate a non-native accent, the first thing they do is drop every single 3rd singular ‘s’. But while non-native speakers are prone to dropping that extra ‘s’, they don’t drop every single one. Often they will remember to add the ‘s’. Just every now and then it slips their mind. The over-generalization of features like this is always a tell-tale sign that the actor is not actually a non-native speaker. Both actors in Big Night did a fantastic job at keeping those 3rd singular suffixes inconsistent, sometimes pronouncing them, and sometimes not.
One really nice detail the actors in Big Night also did right was what’s called H-insertion. Anybody who knows a little bit Italian will know that there is no H sound in Italian. For example the word horrible translates into orribile in Italian. Hs are just not part of the Italian sound system. Additionally, the H sound in English is a very soft sound consisting of air leaving the mouth with only very little obstruction. If your articulators aren’t already used to making this soft action, it is a difficult sound to master. This is the case for many Italians so sometimes it’s just easier for them to drop the H sounds when speaking English. This way a word like here can sound like ear. But non-native speakers do know that dropping Hs is not technically correct in standard English (*it can be in other native English dialects though e.g. Cockney), so they try to pronounce them but here’s where English spelling isn’t very helpful either. Some English words have an H in spelling that is not pronounced either, such as in the words honest and hour. So not only will Italian speakers have to learn how to produce that sound with their articulators, they then also need to learn when to pronounce this sound when speaking English. As a result, Italians sometimes add an H sound in places where there actually is no H in English, so that a word like eat can sound like heat. In BigNight you can hear both Primo and Secondo insert such hyper-corrected Hs. But just like with the 3rd singular ‘s’, non-native speakers are inconsistent with their usage of Hs as well. Primo and Secondo don’t just drop every single H, sometimes they do pronounce it in the right places. They also don’t always insert an H where it shouldn’t be, only every now and then. Tucci and Shalhoub nail this in Big Night. One good example of this occurs around 15 minutes into the movie when you can hear Primo say “say hi for me!” with a clearly audible H sound in hi, immediately followed by a hyper-corrected H-insertion in “you go… hout? “.
The actors and writers of Big Night did many things so wonderfully perfect but making sure their characters’ English is inconsistent definitely deserves extra recognition. Not many movies pay that much attention to detail when it comes to non-native accents but it’s important if you want to respectfully portray a non-native accent and do it justice. It makes the characters much more authentic and believable and as such has a huge impact on the audience’s enjoyment of the film.
Finally, the writers of this movie also get some extra brownie points from me for one of my favorite phrases ever said by a non-native speaker in a movie, which is when Primo said: “Maybe I should make mashed potatoes for on the other side”, instead of saying “for the other side” clearly not fully understanding the concept of ‘side’ being short for ‘side dish’ in English in this context. Learning a new language is difficult and it is normal for non-native speakers to have learned one meaning of a word without knowing how it’s used in another context.
All in all: The dialect work we see in Big Night is just *chef’s kiss*!
Last weekend I rewatched Thor: Ragnarok (aka the best Marvel movie out there) and I realized that I don’t just love this movie because it’s the perfect blend of funny, anti-colonialist, and action-packed but also because it includes some fantastic Kiwi accents with Rachel House as Topaz and of course Taika Waititi himself as Korg. New Zealand English accents sadly are not featured in many mainstream movies of the Northern hemisphere so they’re relatively unknown accents. But they are some of the most fun and beautiful accents (in my opinion) and deserve more recognition.
There’s a lot going on in New Zealand English phonology but in this short post I will only discuss three vowels that are very distinct in Kiwi English due to a fascinating phonological change called a chain shift. A chain shift refers to a series of sound changes that are connected to each other, i.e. when one vowel moves to a new position, another vowel is pushed or pulled away from its original place too. Chain shifts can include many different vowels – in one of the most famous chain shifts, the so-called Great Vowel Shift, pretty much every vowel in Middle English changed drastically. The chain shift I want to discuss here affected three vowels in New Zealand: TRAP, DRESS, and FLEECE.
Here’s what happened to these three vowels in New Zealand English within the last century :
New Zealand English Chain Shift of front vowels (TRAP, DRESS, and KIT).
This gif shows a so-called vowel trapezium which is a tool linguists use to depict approximate positions of vowels within our mouth. The trapezium represents your oral space, from the front of your mouth (=left side of the trapezium) to the back of your mouth (=far right side of the trapezium), as well as your hard palate (=top line) and the very bottom of your mouth (=bottom line). Where we put a vowel in this trapezium will show the tongue’s position, i.e. how high up or low your tongue is for that vowel but also how far back or how front in your mouth. New Zealand accents started out with a similar vowel trapezium to that of modern-day Received Pronunciation (RP) for the TRAP, DRESS and KIT vowels (depicted in brown in the above gif). That means that these tree vowels sounded similar to this:
TRAP, DRESS, and KIT vowels in RP
The first vowel that changed was the one in words like TRAP. This vowel started out being pronounced with quite an open jaw and the tongue resting comfortably in the front of the mouth behind the lower teeth. It then was gradually pronounced with a higher tongue position until it reached a very similar tongue position to DRESS vowels. Because of that, a word like bat in a New Zealand English accent sounds like bet to the American or British listener. You can hear Taika Waititi’s raised TRAP vowels as Korg in the above video in words like that, actually, gladiator, pamphlets or hammer.
You can imagine that TRAP vowels being pronounced so similarly to DRESS vowels can lead to quite some confusion. If bat sounds like bet, how do we know which word the speaker means? To create a clear distinction again, DRESS vowels moved out of the way, approaching the tongue height of KIT vowels. A New Zealand English speaker’s bet now sounds like an American or British English speaker’s bit or sometimes even beet. We can hear this tongue raising for DRESS vowels in Korg’s speech in words like yeah, friend, revolution, sense, perishes, let, weapons, or dead.
With this second vowel raising, DRESS vowels became too similar to KIT vowels and again to avoid misunderstandings, KIT vowels moved away from their original position. This time, however, the tongue was already very high up in the mouth, so there was really nowhere to go towards the top. So instead, the tongue retreated and moved towards the center of the mouth. This way, KIT vowels ended up being pronounced with a very relaxed tongue and now sound very similar to a schwa, i.e. the most relaxed sound your face can make which is a sound similar to the American hesitation sound ‘uh’ . Pronouncing KIT vowels so centrally is arguably the most famous Kiwi English feature, perfectly exemplified by the words fish and chips sounding more like fush and chups. You can also find these centralized and relaxed KIT vowels in Korg’s speech, for example in the words this, it, insect, scissors, interested, oris.
With all this moving around, the TRAP, DRESS, and KIT vowels underwent the following journey in New Zealand English:
The evolution of TRAP, DRESS, and KIT vowels in New Zealand English
Now that you know about these 3 distinctive vowels in Kiwi English, I’m sure you can find some more examples in the speech of everybody’s favorite prime minister Jacinda Ardern in the following video!
